yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Epic Mountain Climb Proves “Exploration Is Not Dead” | Exposure


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

This was old school, real turn of the century Adventure. It was everything that exploration and Adventure is and can be, and those elements that we've lost along the way. We wanted an anti-Everest, and we really got an anti-Everest. I mean, Mar, the northern tip of Myanmar, Burma, there was sort of a geographic question mark up there: What is the highest point in Southeast Asia?

There were three options: Kako Razi, Gamlang Razi, and then an unnamed peak. Our initial goal was to try to measure these points and figure out what in fact was the highest. I think this Expedition surprised all of us; it was much more complex right from the beginning than we had anticipated. Immediately, we had to cut half of our gear.

After the first day of walking, which was a 16-mile day with 5,000 feet of vertical gain, we had to cut our gear again, 'cause we realized there was no way that we were going to get enough Porters to carry even the gear that we had. Still, I thought getting to base camp, I would be very comfortable because this is something that I'm comfortable with.

You know, now it's kind of like up, now we go up. We rested one day in base camp before starting to climb, and again, there's no trail; we don't know where we're going. It was up and down and sharp and scary and horrifying, and 6,000 feet of vertical gain from base camp. It started to occur to us that maybe we didn't have everything that we needed, that we had been a little bit hasty with our gear cuts.

I started to wonder at that point if we had enough clothing to withstand the wind that we were going to potentially encounter up higher, and to be fair, we didn't. As we got up to Camp 3, we realized that the terrain ahead of us was just a little bit too complex and too dangerous for five of us to be climbing together, and we needed to cut the team. Now, it wasn't to say that Hillary and Emily couldn't have climbed it; it was just to expedite and try to get to the summit and try to measure this mountain.

We had to look at who had the most experience on that kind of terrain. We left; it was Mark, Renan, and myself. The ridge that we were trying to climb, it was, you know, sort of akin to the edge of a very poorly made saw. You're going to have to reserve some energy because you have to essentially reclimb the whole ridge in reverse.

I got to a point where I felt very concerned that we were putting too much up and down, too much sort of complex convoluted terrain in between us and safety. We don't have sleeping bags at this point; we don't have a tent. We have a stove, but not enough fuel, and I'm scared about that.

Mark started leading the next pitch, so he goes down and around this corner, and there's these huge kind of rock teeth sticking up. Then he came back, you know, 15-20 minutes later and said, "This is it; it's over. It's too complex with what we have to keep going." The summit, you could see it; you could— I mean, it was right there, and it was hard. It was heartbreaking; it's just heartbreaking.

I'm proud that we put in as much effort as we did, and I'm proud of the decision that we made to turn around. You're pushing that envelope; you're pushing that edge. And failures—I mean, I think failure is just a piece of all of this. The major takeaway from an expedition like this is that exploration is not dead.

That's really just going to push us to discover more and more and more about our planet and hopefully inspire us to care about our planet as a human family. I mean, that's putting exploration in sort of a context of something that is important and relevant and needs to continue.

More Articles

View All
BREAKING: The FED Pauses Rates, Housing Declines, Recession Cancelled
What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here, and well, everything is going to… After falling stock prices, brand new recession warnings, and mortgages reaching their highest level in 23 years, the Federal Reserve has once again decided to pause the rate hikes for t…
Ultimate Guide to GTD in 2022: Amplenote Edition
So in today’s video we’re going to be exploring the best ways to implement getting things done or GTD for short in 2022. Do not worry if you have not yet read the book or heard about the book; we’re going to look at why these Concepts work and how to help…
15 Power Moves to Take Control and Build an Off Grid Empire
Hey there, my friend. Let’s run away together. Let’s run away from the control of traditional financial, health care, and resource systems and take control of our own lives for a change. Now, the appeal of living off-grid has skyrocketed in the last few …
Worked example: Quotient rule with table | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
Let F be a function such that f of 1 is equal to 3. Frime of 1 is equal to 5. Let G be the function G of x is equal to 2x cubed. Let capital F be a function defined as so capital F is defined as lowercase f of x divided by lowercase G of x. And they want …
Why Metals Spontaneously Fuse Together In Space
Shall I put this down? Yeah, of course. Ahhh, alright, we’re about to do some welding. Go on. Here on Earth, if you want to get two metals to fuse, you have to heat them up past their melting point. But in space, it’s a different story, as we found out t…
Khan Academy Ed Talks with Marc Sternberg - Wednesday, March 10
Hello! Welcome everyone to Ed Talks with Khan Academy. I’m Christine DeCervo, the Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy, and today I’m excited to talk to Mark Steinberg, who is the K-12 Education Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation. So…